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Wednesday, 23 July 2008

Last November I upgraded my desktop PC. Recently I've repurposed it as a media center running MythTV (and also for print serving/file serving etc).

The hardware is as follows:

Sonata III 500 W case

Gigabyte GA965P-S3 motherboard

Core2 Duo E6550 CPU

Gigabyte 8400GS Nvidia video card

WinFast DTV1000 digital tuner card

320MB SATA disk

Kingston 1Gig DDR2 800MHz memory

Since then, I've added a 1Terabyte SATA disk - prices keep coming down every week. You can get a 1T disk for just over AUD200 now.

I installed MythBuntu 8.04 and found it a very simple process. I had to configure it for TwinView (Clone) so I've got the same output on my TV as I have on the LCD monitor. Then I had to get sound via the SPDIF optical output. To do this you have to:

Unmute the ICE958 channel via alsamixer

Configure MythTV to use ALSA:SPDIF and AC3 + DTS to SPDIF passthrough

I also had to change my video player command to 'mplayer -ao alsa:device=spdif -fs -zoom -quiet so -vo xv %s' so that video with only stereo sound would use the SPDIF

I haven't set up a remote control yet. The TV card I have doesn't look like it is supported under LIRC. So I might look at getting a dual tuner sometime, hopefully one that has a supported remote.

The video has a slight defect when fast moving action is displayed - horizontal splits in the picture appear, but it hasn't proved too bad so far. I haven't had time to look into this one, hopefully sometime soon I'll start looking around the forums. I hope the solution isn't a better video card!

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